Free Republic

The numbers are in for the evening news coverage of the shutdown. During the first 15 nights of October, ABC, CBS and NBC blamed the Republicans 41 times for the shutdown, blamed both sides 17 times, and blamed Obama and the Democrats ... never. Let's just focus on NBC, where Brian Williams obediently pushed White House talking points. Williams described the consequences as nearly criminal on the Oct. 8 Nightly News: "All kinds of people are getting cheated out of salaries, benefits, medical treatment." But NBC was cheating viewers out of truth by deliberately telling only half the story. On...

As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn't one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy's stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it's a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy's approach to government or embrace his political beliefs. Today's Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn't give the time of day to a candidate like JFK. The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even...

If a US default on interest and principal payments were to happen, make no mistake it would be a default of choice. Obama’s choice, that is. But he wouldn’t be the only one defaulting. Nor is he the only one to blame here. In order for the United States government to default on paying interest on the debt that we owe, a series of decisions would have to issue from the White House that would prevent those payments in the first place. There is enough money to prevent default, just not enough to keep the rest of the government...

Republicans and Democrats are still name-calling in their arguments over the government shutdown, out-of-control federal spending and the implementation of Obamacare. Yet if both sides would agree to just follow the earlier advice of President Obama, tempers might cool and a deal could still be reached. And had President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis. In 2006, Obama rightly called for an end to the Bush administration's intemperate deficit spending that had resulted in an annual deficit of $250 billion...

Weird things happen in Boulder Colorado — it has a gorilla run to support apes in Uganda, locals dash around naked wearing pumpkin heads Halloween night (sorry, not offering up a link) and let’s just say 4/20 is the locals’ favorite date. Despite the city’s liberal background, students at the University of Colorado Boulder on Tuesday blamed President Obama and Democrats more than the GOP for the partial government shutdown. “Everybody is blaming Obama and the Democrats, is this normal?” Caleb Bonham of Campus Reform asked after several undergraduates quickly identified the culprit. “Um, no I don’t think so but...

Government wants you to play a role in the "shutdown" of the federal government. Your role is to panic. Republicans and Democrats both assume that shutting some government is a terrible thing. The press concurs. "Shutdown threatens fragile economy," warns Politico. "Federal workers turn to prayer," laments The Washington Post. If the public starts noticing that life goes on as usual without all 3.4 million federal workers, we might get dangerous ideas, like doing without so much government. Politicians don't want that. They'd rather have us worry about how America will cope. President Obama gave a speech where he actually...

In the showdown over the shutdown of the U.S. government, the Obamaites tipped their hand yesterday as what their strategy is. Taking a page out of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," the plan is to maximize the people's pain -- to maximize the political damage to the enemy, the Republican Party. What else explains it? Consider this: Asked Wednesday if there were any danger of America defaulting on her debt, President Obama rushed to assure a reporter that, yes, indeed, there certainly is such a peril. Why would a president act in so perverse a manner, were he not...

Shutting down the government in an effort to use a budget fight to get rid of Obamacare is not the strategy I would have recommended for the GOP. And while Republicans can be blamed for starting the shutdown, it's increasingly apparent that President Obama and the Democrats deserve the lion's share of blame for not only prolonging it, but for making it as painful as possible. Obama has always had a bit of a vindictive streak when it comes to politics. I think it stems from his Manichaean view of America. There are the reasonable people -- who agree with...

While Washington, D.C. braced Monday evening for the federal government to shut down, Hillary Clinton hosted rich, connected, powerful Democrats at her swanky northwest D.C. home to raise money for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

The President and the Left have been speaking out about what they say is the “misguided focus of Republicans” on trying to eliminate Obamacare. Obama rants about how Republicans want to eliminate health care for 30 million Americans. Truth be told, he never wanted the Affordable Care Act and neither did the rest of the leaders of his team. Some news organizations have been stringing together video of prominent Democrats speaking the truth. What they want is a single-payer, government-run healthcare system where insurance companies are obliterated from the healthcare process and every healthcare dollar runs through their hands and...

As in cockroaches. But vermin is nothing new in a building that is 213 years old--and roaches aren't the worst of it...

It’s always a little galling (not to mention hilarious) for those of us on the right to reflect that the Democratic Party — the party of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and family-destroying social programs — the party of Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Baltimore — the party that facilitates a black abortion rate that would bring a smile to the face of Planned Parenthood’s genocidally racist founder — has somehow managed to sell itself to African Americans as the friend of black people! But it’s beginning to be equally galling (and equally comic) to reflect that the Democrats have also...

Simple logic via the Weekly Standard: If the IRS is already this corrupt at its current funding level, imagine how much more corrupt it’ll be once there’s less money to pay for oversight and ethical training of IRS employees. By the same token, presumably if we increased the agency’s budget tenfold, we’d see a sharp decline in corruption thanks to all the extra oversight and training IRS workers would be getting. I wonder if Serrano has a ballpark figure on how much extra we’d need to pay the agency to get them to not harass conservatives in the future. If...

A new TV-ad campaign in the swing states of Florida, West Virginia, Ohio and Missouri is blasting Democratic Party incumbents for sending billions of dollars to nations that many Americans would place unequivocally in the “enemies” column. The ads created by RAND PAC, the political action arm of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., already are running, with purchases targeting Sens. Joe Manchin in West Virgina, Bill Nelson in Florida and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. The spots will begin running this week in Missouri, where Sen. Claire McCaskill in fighting to stave off a surging challenge from U.S. Rep. Todd Akin. A...

The list of flacks for leftism is drearily familiar: academia, public school systems, the entertainment industry, professional organizations, nonprofit foundations of vast wealth, the bureaucracies dependent upon social grievance and mind-numbing regulations (which includes not only federal and state bureaucrats, but "experts" in private industry who would have spent their careers mastering the arcane arts of regulatory compliance), and, of course, the media.

When I think of the word enthusiasm, I am reminded of a scene out of the 1987 movie "The Untouchables" about gangster Al Capone. In the scene, Capone (played by Robert De Niro) is walking around a table that is surrounded by his men. As he walks, he talks. "Enthusiasms, enthusiasms ... What are mine?" he asks. "What draws my admiration? What is that which gives me joy? Baseball! A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team. Teamwork ......

56 Senators voted in favor of a plan yesterday that would allow the Keystone pipeline to go forward by cancelling the bureaucratic roadblocks put up by the Obama administration/world-wide bus tour. “The 56-42 vote came after President Barack Obama called Democratic senators to lobby them to oppose the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast,” reports FoxNews.“Even so, 11 Democrats sided with Republicans to sidestep Obama's rejection of the pipeline and allow the $7 billion project to go forward.”Yet, despite the majority vote, Senate rules apparently require a...

By now you’ve probably heard about the “Alice in Wonderland”-themed Halloween party that Obama threw back in 2009 and which the White House tried to cover up (a charge they’re already furiously denying). Here at PJM Belladonna Rogers and J. Christian Adams have already blogged about it, so there’s no need for me to go into the details any further. But the question everyone’s asking is: Where are the photos? Well, unfortunately, it seems that the Obamas successfully banned discouraged photographers from inside the party itself. But all is not lost: There were a few photos taken inside of Johnny...

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) tells MSNBC regulations create jobs because a business will have to hire people to help them comply with the new requirement. "I think the answer is no," Ellison said when asked if he believes regulations kill jobs. "And here is why: When we talked about increasing fuel efficiency standards, the industry responded, and they need engineers and designers and manufacturers, and they need actually more people to help respond to the new requirement." "I believe if the government says, look, we have got to reduce our carbon footprint, you will kick into gear a whole number...

Occupation can lead to ownership, whether or not you want it. The spread of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement was met with initial hesitation in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That might be an appropriate response to any protests that aim themselves squarely at the establishment, particularly those with goals that are diverse and diffuse as the current protesters' are. But a consensus is emerging among Democrats that the "Occupy" movement is worth tapping into, even helping along and joining with in some instances. "I support the message to the establishment," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on...